Citizen-driven ballot measures focus on fracking, municipalization

By John Aguilar, Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
08/18/2013 10:50:26 AM MDT

Updated:
10/01/2013 02:25:41 PM MDT

Status of citizen initiatives in Boulder and Broomfield countiesBoulder: Debt limit charter amendment on electric municipalization: Third and final reading from City Council on referral to ballot set for Tuesday.

Lafayette: Oil and gas drilling ban within city limits: Ballot language established at the Aug. 6 City Council meeting. Occupation tax in lieu of Xcel Energy franchise: City clerk still counting and verifying petition signatures.

Broomfield: Five-year fracking moratorium within city limits: Ballot language established at the Aug. 13 City Council meeting

Get ready for a rough-and-tumble, grassroots-fueled campaign season in Boulder and Broomfield counties, the likes of which we haven't seen in quite some time.

Four citizen initiatives -- focused on the hot button issues of oil and gas extraction and electric municipalization -- are on the November ballot or likely headed there, revealing a restless electorate who appear to feel that some of their desires are better fulfilled at the ballot box than at city hall.

Lafayette leads the pack with two measures. One would ban oil and gas drilling in the city and the other would replace the annual $740,000 Xcel Energy franchise fee with an occupation tax as part of an effort to decouple the city from the utility and fund renewable energy programs.

Broomfield voters in November will consider a five-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial oil and gas extraction method commonly known as fracking.

Meanwhile Boulder residents, who haven't seen a citizen-led ballot measure in seven years, will get the opportunity to decide on a charter amendment requiring voters to approve a total debt limit when forming a municipal electric service. The measure would also require that affected residents of unincorporated Boulder County be allowed to vote in the debt limit election if the utility is to serve areas outside the city limits.

While the initiative in Boulder takes a different tack than the measures in the other two cities, the underlying sense of frustration with local elected officials is a common theme in all four efforts.

Larry Miloshevich, a 17-year Lafayette resident who is part of the campaign behind the occupation tax measure there, said the drive to put the issue on the ballot came from a sense that the Lafayette City Council was simply going to rubber stamp another 20-year franchise agreement with Xcel without considering whether the utility was working hard enough to develop renewable and clean sources of energy.

He and his group, Lafayette's Energy Future, collected approximately 1,300 signatures this summer with hopes of meeting the threshold of 948 valid signatures to get the measure before voters. The city clerk's office is still going through the petitions.

"More and more, there are enough citizens who think clean energy for various reasons is important enough to move forward much more aggressively on it and local government is not going to do it," Miloshevich said. "Our city council is very risk-averse. This would be a big move from the status quo for them."

Hot button issues the focus

Elena Nuñez, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, said the citizen initiative is a powerful tool for state residents who believe critical issues are being glossed over or not addressed at all by those in charge. It is not surprising, she said, that a topic as divisive and controversial as fracking is beginning to bubble up in towns and cities after efforts at the state level proved unsatisfactory to many.

"The citizen initiative often highlights hot button issues that the voters don't think are being resolved," Nuñez said. "It's an important tool by which to raise issues when their elected officials won't take action."

At the other end of the political spectrum, Independence Institute President Jon Caldara said the citizen initiative process is a vital component of local democracy, even if he thinks the environmentally themed campaigns in play this year are "silly and ridiculous."

"The people of Colorado are the final check and balance over their elected officials," Caldara said. "I support strongly the right to petition."

That feeling of needing to do more is what compelled Cliff Willmeng to take on the fracking issue in Lafayette. Fracking opponents claim that drilling, particularly the water-sand-chemical mix used during the fracking process to loosen up deeply buried pockets of oil and gas, risks contaminating water and air and harming human health.

Willmeng helped form the anti-fracking group East Boulder County United last summer and tried to work with the City Council over the past year on enacting a moratorium on new drilling permits in the city. But after city officials resisted, citing the lack of recent new drilling activity in Lafayette and the specter of lawsuits from the industry and the state should they pursue a temporary ban, East Boulder County United began organizing for a fracking ban at the ballot box.

"We feel oil and gas extraction is headed to Lafayette," Willmeng said. "We went to local government to see what we could do with that and they essentially told us their hands are tied. The city made an aversion to any threat of litigation their highest priority."

East Boulder County United went out and collected more than 2,000 signatures, turning them into the city clerk's office in early July. A few weeks later, Lafayette verified that a sufficient number of valid signatures had been collected to meet the city's threshold and the City Council formally referred the measure to the ballot.

The council has since passed a three-year moratorium on new oil and gas drilling activity and, earlier this month, a Lafayette resident filed a complaint against the petitioners, claiming the petitions voters signed didn't carry proper ballot language. A hearing to determine the validity of the complaint will be held at 2 p.m. on Thursday at Lafayette City Hall.

Willmeng is undeterred. He looks forward to seeing whether a grassroots movement like his, which used an all-volunteer team to gather signatures, can prevail on Election Day.

"This is an absolutely grassroots, organic effort by the community. These ballot initiatives are a classic form of communities taking self-control and exercising self-determination," he said. "Ultimately, the people that will determine the future of Lafayette oil and gas extraction will be the community itself."

That's how Nate Troup sees the situation in his city. He moved to the Anthem neighborhood in Broomfield two years ago and quickly learned that oil and gas operators were asking the city for permission to drill more than 20 natural gas wells in North Park.

He helped form the group Our Broomfield to prod the city's elected leaders to implement a moratorium on new drilling activity while several statewide studies concerning the health and environmental effects of drilling are completed.

In June, the Broomfield City Council made it clear that it did not favor a fracking moratorium and Our Broomfield decided to take the issue straight to the voters.

The group turned in nearly 3,400 signatures -- far more than it needed -- on Aug. 2 and the council set the ballot title language last week. On Friday, Our Broomfield filed a protest against the wording the city approved for the initiative, accusing it of removing the words "public safety and welfare" from the measure.

'Gamesmanship going on'

In Boulder, the nature of the citizen initiative may be different than what is going on in Lafayette and Broomfield, but 20-year Boulder resident Roger Koenig said the same motivation -- dissatisfaction with city policy-making -- is behind the effort. Instead of trying to get the local government to take action on something -- as is happening in the communities to the east -- Koenig and others concerned about Boulder's municipalization effort are trying to keep the city from getting too far ahead of itself.

This spring, a group called Voter Approval of Debt Limits formed to call attention to the potential fiscal implications of Boulder starting its own electric service. It collected more than 8,000 signatures to get a measure on the ballot that would require voter approval for debt incurred during the municipalization process and give Boulder County residents a voice in municipalization if they as customers are affected by Boulder's efforts.

"It's about the fiscal responsibility of the city," Koenig said. "More people are engaged and concerned with what's going on with our government."

But the Voter Approval of Debt Limits measure has been criticized as less than grassroots in nature by those favoring municipalization because the group spent $14,000 on paid petition circulators to get its measure on the ballot. And they note that Xcel filed an issue committee in support of the charter amendment and also polled language for it in the spring, before petitions were circulated.

Katy Atkinson, spokeswoman for the group, said using paid circulators was simply a logistical strategy by the group to ensure the measure had enough time to get through the signature process and the city referral process to make it to the ballot.

Late on Friday, an attempt by New Era Colorado to have signatures in favor of the measure invalidated because of alleged fraud committed during the signature gathering phase was partially successful when Boulder City Clerk Alisa Lewis threw out more than 500 signatures collected by one circulator. But the invalidated signatures weren't enough to get the utility debt limit measure removed from the ballot.

In the meantime, the Boulder City Council decided on Aug. 6 to counter the debt limits campaign by voting to place its own charter amendment on the November ballot that sets a $214 million debt limit on the acquisition of Xcel's electrical distribution system. Both charter amendments will require a third vote from City Council on Tuesday before they are finalized for the ballot.

Atkinson said all the back and forth between her group and the city, in addition to the challenges and countermeasures that have surfaced, are going to make for "a very bizarre ballot for the people of Boulder."

"There's some gamesmanship going on," she said.

Initiatives court opposition

Boulder's citizen initiative is not the only one running into complications as November approaches. Broomfield's fracking moratorium campaign spawned an opposition group called It's Our Broomfield Too, which stands in firm support of oil and gas drilling in the city.

Linda Reynolds, an 18-year resident of Broomfield, joined the group because she felt that fracking was getting a bad name and that only one side of the story was being told.

"They are trying to take the property rights away from mineral rights owners," she said. "Our economy is driven by the oil and gas industry I don't want to buy my energy from Russia, I don't want to buy my energy from Saudi Arabia. We want the voters to be informed, not misinformed."

Reynolds said It's Our Broomfield Too will work hard this fall to campaign against the fracking moratorium. She criticized the opposing camp for having leaders who haven't lived long in Broomfield and questioned just how local and grassroots the group really is.

Troup dismissed Reynolds complaints, saying many of his group's members are longtime Broomfield residents. Our Broomfield didn't use paid circulators to collect signatures, he said, and he characterized the campaign as "entirely citizen driven."

"Where we ultimately are from is fundamentally irrelevant to whether it is grassroots or not," Troup said. "I don't think it affects the authenticity of it at all."

Besides the protest lodged against the anti-fracking measure in Lafayette earlier this month, the city's other citizen initiative has run into its own thicket of electoral brambles. It will be competing with a measure referred by City Council to the ballot that asks voters if they want to renew the franchise with Xcel for a year.

Miloshevich, of Lafayette's Energy Future, said he had hoped that the city would have put both the franchise renewal measure on the ballot along with his group's occupation tax alternative and let them battle it out. But in mid-June, Lafayette City Council voted against placing the measure from Lafayette's Energy Future on the ballot.

"We didn't want to conduct a signature drive -- that took a big bite out of our time," Miloshevich said. "It was very much a last resort."

Dissatisfaction mixed with shrewdness

Lafayette Mayor Carolyn Cutler said she understands the frustration that some residents in the city are expressing but she said in her role as mayor she needs to take into consideration the desires and rights of everyone she represents.

"We take an oath to the city and to the state constitution, and in some areas our breadth of influence doesn't go that far," Cutler said. "They are frustrated that we don't do something and we are frustrated with the limits on us."

She doesn't feel that the pair of citizen initiatives being pushed forward this year translate into an overall unhappy city, ready to take up pitchforks and storm city hall.

"I don't think you can say people are unhappy, but there are issues that people are frustrated about," she said.

Caldara agrees that there isn't necessarily a more intense sense of dissatisfaction among voters this year than in any other recent year. Part of what's at play with the various citizen initiatives this year, he said, is more shrewd than might appear on the surface. There is a synergy over fracking developing in multiple communities, perhaps setting the stage for a more widespread campaign against oil and gas drilling in next year's election, he said.

Besides Lafayette and Broomfield, advocacy groups in Fort Collins and Loveland are gathering signatures and pushing their own fracking moratoria measures to the ballot this November.

"This is building toward a statewide fracking ban initiated in 2014," Caldara said. "And these are the test cases they want to work with in the off year. It's not a bad strategy."

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